


Romance, in the Palm of Your Hand

by blesser



Series: The Verger-Bloom Anniversary Tapes [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Canon Divergence, Deleted Scene, F/F, First Date, First Time, Hannibal Anniversary, It's just them gasp, Murder Wives, My Apologies to Alexandre Dumas, Revenge as Pillow Talk, Second Time, Vulnerability, balconies, criminal dealings, ish, private jets, season 3 episode 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-29
Updated: 2017-08-29
Packaged: 2018-12-21 22:07:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11953632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blesser/pseuds/blesser
Summary: "Ghastly habit,” Margot mutters around the unlit cigarette.“So are balconies,” Alana shrugs, “we’ve all got our deathly temptations.”***In honour of the two year anniversary of the Murder Wives flying of into the sunset, an imagined first date.





	Romance, in the Palm of Your Hand

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't think I would have time or inclination to do something for the two year anniversary but then I went and got second degree burns and a whole lot of time on my hands so: fic.

It’s all about heights these days.

The distance between an entirely smashable third storey window and the hard gravel below, how much fracture per foot drop, how elevators make her tremble, the way ‘ambition is a tall ladder Alana and a shaky one at that’ sounded spoken over her bruised body while her eyes glared at the distance between the bed and the sterile hospital ceiling.

Now, in this moment, the drop down to the sea is a far thing.

The Mediterranean is a smooth and unhurried black sheet of glass below, undoubtedly chill if the frigid December air is anything to go by. It yawns below her.

Alana is keeping her eyes resolutely on the horizon and hands tightly clenched, on both balcony rail and her cane.

“Pride goeth,” says a mild voice to her left.

There is a shuffle of fabric and an exhaled huff of something that could be an amused laugh. It’s Margot Verger leaning on the railing, wearing a ridiculous coat and peering into the sea below like a fox looking into a hen house.

“I haven’t an ounce left in me,” Alana shifts on her feet warily, takes in her companion, “all got switched out in the blood transfusions.”

They are both caught gazing at the waves for a long moment in that way people are always trapped and dwarfed before the sea. Alana is surprised in the stillness, she had assumed there was nothing much in the world that could hold the Verger heiresses attention, let alone make her sharp edges and big colours seem small.

The late winter is apparent in the water, it looks dark and impenetrable, like the burnt top of the crème brule they had shattered earlier. Alana shifts uncomfortably at the imagery, her mind is such a splintered and uncomfortable thing _. Oh, what she wouldn't do for a long, hot bath_.

They’ve been at Peron for hours. Alana has eaten a slow and luxurious dinner that probably cost as much as her car and then, when nothing happened to move things along, she sipped sweet white wine at an increasing pace.

The table conversation seemed mostly inane and Alana, on too many pain meds to be drinking so liberally, had drifted quickly from the scene until finally, flushed and disconnected, she had broken away from the party and drifted outside. 

The table settings are fancy, intimate, everything snowbank white. Alana can’t be sure but she thinks perhaps the whole venue is theirs for the evening. Or, more accurately, Margot Verger’s. All of the surrounding tables are hosting large men in leather jackets, their holsters barely concealed, speaking rapid French, Italian or Arabic while they missed their mouths and dripped balsamic on the pure tablecloths.

Margot has hardly looked at her all evening, a thought that makes Alana’s stomach curl in a way that has nothing to do with the wine, and has instead been mostly talking to an elderly Italian man and his young wife.

Alana had spent a student year in Europe, but her Italian is limited to the usual; shop talk, bar talk, sex talk, long phonetically memorised quotes of Franco Basaglia…

“Is anything the matter?”

Alana feels told off, caught in the act. It’s ridiculous.

“No,” she adjusts the grip on the top of the cane until she can feel where the little imprints will be on her palm later, “I suppose I’m just wondering what my role is in all this.”

Margot considers her, not in an appraising way, merely with the flat and curious expression she seems to let through occasionally, like when she is looking at the origami fleur de lis napkins, looking at a thousand euro cheque, looking at the view from the private jet, looking at Alana.

 _She is a watchful woman_ , Alana decides then, _despite all the ice princess masks and bored coolness_.

“How are you enjoying Marseille?” Margot dodges the question directly.

_Clever too._

“Beautiful,” Alana says too quickly glancing away and back over the bay, “but dark.”

“Quite right,” Margot says apologetically, “we have rather spent all our day inside bank vaults and board rooms and come out with the moon.”

She tilts her face up to the thing in question and her face is framed by stars, her jewelry lit up so. The movement ghosts her fur coat down a slim, pale shoulder. Alana wrinkles her nose as it tickles softly against her face some.

“There’s less chance of being spotted in the moonlight,” Alana ventures.

Margot turns ballerina fast so her back is arched against the railing, she sweeps a hand towards the restaurant interior, where her men are boisterous with freely flowing French wine and Alana can smell the rich smoke of cigars.

“Does it look like we are hiding?”

Forever incapable of ignoring an observation, especially one so glaringly obvious and intimate as ‘ _you look like you’ve been hiding from something your entire life_ ’ Alana can’t help herself.

“Yes.”

She is reminded of an owl as Margot looks back towards her, or some night time predatory thing. Alana thinks maybe she should back away, but there is no real threat in this person, just a sadness and a beautiful castle wall to climb perhaps.

Margot doesn’t move away either, if anything, the warmth of her body is closer to Alana’s, so drunk flushed and receptive, she smells like a surprisingly masculine soap and some sort of citrus perfume, the bitter chocolate from dessert and maybe jasmine.

“Of course, you see everything,” it isn’t a mockery, Margot states it quietly like fact, impressed even, “after all, you are the family psychiatrist are you not Doctor Bloom?”

A throat clearing behind them prevents Alana from answering that she is in fact, only technically seeing _Mr_ Verger in any official patient based capacity. A sweaty faced server hovers in the Christmas light strung doorway, cloth over his arm and face apologetic. He tells them coffee is served and Margot thanks him earnestly.

“Well?”

Alana looks away from the sea and into Margot’s face, she herself feels very dizzy, but Margot looks sculpted and unflappable. It makes Alana tremble, to be seen right through, as though she is in a rapidly ascending elevator, or back in a Baltimore townhouse suspended somewhere between the guest bedroom and the solid driveway.

She nods.

“Quite,” Margot twists her face into a friendly, wicked smile and turns to head back inside, “then it could be argued that your role here is to make me feel better Doctor.”

Alana might begrudge what would have otherwise been a mocking comment, a degradation or assumption. She is not arm candy for criminals, distraction from foul deeds. But the way Margot looks back as she reaches the doorway, looking tired beyond her years and…wistful almost, has Alana thinking she might be telling the truth. All the hired muscle at your clandestine meetings and the free wine in France means nothing if nobody, really, has your back.

So Alana walks away from the black sea and sips coffee and smiles and thinks about how she got here, where the hell she thinks she’s going.

Margot has her chin in one hand and is nodding for the cheque to be brought over, making congenial apologies and goodnights to her guests. Her left hand strays across a precisely pressed crease in the cloth, fingertips skitting over discarded silver spoons and down, down under the table.

Alana sets her cup noisily into the saucer, watches distractedly as the Italians swathe themselves in fur wraps and tastes strong coffee on her tongue as she bites it. The hand on her thigh tightens just a little and she looks dead ahead, manages a warm ‘buona notte’ and a smile.

 *

It’s a little after two, according to the bells from the basilica.

“It’s always balconies with you.”

The weight of a hotel robe, undoubtedly the thin but expensive, silk kind with the name embroidered on the pocket, falls around Alana’s shoulders. She hears the failed click, spark of a lighter and Margot sighing.

“Ghastly habit,” Margot mutters around the unlit cigarette.

“So are balconies,” Alana shrugs, “we’ve all got our deathly temptations.”

Alana leans in to cup her hands around the weak flame as well and its heat prickles at her palm. She can just about make out the non-hotel issue robe Margot is wearing, it looks like flannel, soft and green and is probably the most comfortable Margot has ever been in her presence.

They pass the cigarette between each other silently, chastely, with nothing but fingertips touching, a little shy given their recent attachment.

“Why are we here?” Alana says, exasperation winning out over exhilaration, which is cooling like the sweat on her lower back.

“I wanted to give housekeeping a moment alone with the sheets,” Margot flicks the butt into the terrace pool and it sparks up the dark a little as it flies, another light to match all the bedecked villas shining across the bay, so eager for Christmas, “and you looked so cold and naked and beautiful, I had to see you up close again.”

“Don’t be cute, it doesn’t suit you,” Alana lies.

“That’s a bold faced lie,” Margot harrumphs like an affronted cat, she looks it too in the dim light, from the corner of Alana’s eye; sleek, green eyed, hard work, curiously affectionate.

The terrace is private, and although the pool doesn’t look heated or well lit, Alana has a sudden urge to follow that cigarette into its chlorine depths.

She feels loose and carefree in a way she had thought impossible, wants suddenly so many things. She wants to pull Margot down into that dark water, if only just to resurface, shivering and laughing.

She has never heard her laugh, not really. Not yet.

“You needed a witness, you said,” Alana leans forward on her elbows and breathes the salt of the sea right into her lungs, “when you bid me come with you.”

“Dragged you by the hair onto the private jet to the French Riviera did I?” Margot is amused.

Alana goes hot at the words, a bit of shame and a little pleasure. Margot must be remembering too, her fingers pulling Alana’s hair, neck arching, because she is all business all of a sudden.

“The bank was necessity,” she casts about, “I require authorisation from my brother to move any funds.”

“And he and I could be twins separated at birth?”

“Christ no,” Margot blanches sounding very much like she wishes it was _she_  who was separated at birth from her twin, “but as the family psychiatrist, you are a voice of weight in such matters. State if mind, a witness to competency and such. And tonight? Well, tonight you were just good company I suppose.”

“There are less elaborate ways to ask someone on a date,” Alana tucks her hair behind her ears, tries in vain to tame it, “besides you hardly spoke to me.”

“That man was one of the most meticulously dirty cops in all of Italy,” Margot divulges smugly, “excellent memory, terrible morals. He lives here now with his fourth French mistress on account of his countries… displeasure at his professionally kept company and his taste for Marseille delicacies. I don’t need to explain the dangers of knowledge to you or why his peers no longer wanted him around. If there is anyone who can get us on the right path to Florence. It’s that old pig.”

Alana inhales shakily.

“We could be there in nine hours,” Margot says matter-of-factly, “I know you’ve been thinking about it. Take a car, I’ll drive while you load up the guns. I can see it in your wandering eyes Doctor Bloom, and yet, you aren’t the rough and ready, wild west vengeance type are you?”

There is a new weight against Alana’s back, the hot but gentle press on her spine of every inch of Margot burning through two robes like a memory of summer. Alana remembers thinking her cold, _an ice princess_ , how wrong she had been.

“Do you see that, out there?” she hooks her chin on Alana’s shoulder and points to a barely visible land mass out to sea. A looming giant on the horizon. 

“Chateau d'If” Alana says, pushing back against the hold automatically, pleased to find very little give. 

“Top marks, but then,” Margot ’s breath tickles at her jaw, “I knew you were a scholar. And a romantic. That is where revenge was born, at least as far as the story goes.”

"For all evil there are two remedies: time and silence. ”

"All of human wisdom is contained in theses two words-" 

"-hope and wait."

Margot settles her hands over Alana's on the railing, her knee working it's way between her thighs and moving, rocking as gently as the waves. 

“You could throw a stone from here to your target and silence him and yet, where’s the satisfaction without hearing the crunch of impact?" 

“It helps too, sometimes, to see what you could have but can’t reach,” Alana tightens their fingers together on reflex and thinks about her body, immovable for weeks on end, all the things just out of her reach, “hope is a prison on an island just out to sea.”

“Or a beautiful woman in a bank vault, you think you can’t touch her but-”

Margot kisses the back of her neck, the bump of her broken spine. Her mouth is a too big gulp of burning brandy in Alana's throat, her hands the hot bath Alana would have killed for earlier. Before she knew all she had to do was ask, and ask, and ask

“Please,” she asks.

Margot indulges.

The first time round was like a dance. It’s cliché but true and Alana bets they looked beautiful on all those fancy satin hotel sheets, Margot’s pearls spilling everywhere and their hair wild and dark. Lipstick on pale skin, kiss drunk and gasping.

They fucked like strangers, a little over considerate and showy, too slow and too kind. A softly lit movie kind of colision. 

Margot has two fingers under Alana’s chin tipping her head round before she has time to look away from the bay and the resulting sight is a blur of pinprick lights and teeth in her lower lip.

She groans unabashed.

This doesn't look like anything, it is too dark and simple and just for the feel of it. 

The feel of Margot tilting her hips with the hand not holding her throat is urging Alana to move, open, indulge them both. It is heady, both rough and sure.

And then they are kissing.

The crisp air has sobered Alana from earlier a great deal and her head feels wired in and oversensitive as nails scratch lightly up her inner thigh.

Everything about Margot is so in focus now, snatches of features and the hot puff of her breath so close in Alana's ear. The peach, silk haze of before is fading behind this wilder, surer thing.

The scratch of flannel against Alana’s bared shoulder where her own robe has slipped is a grounding counter point to the relentlessness of Margot’s perfect fingers.

Hadn’t Alana watched them all day signing documents, all night at the restaurant table?

As Margot moves the hand from her throat all the way down her front, quick fingered in the tie of the flimsy dressing gown and raising goosebumps on Alana's stomach.

She has her now, and God does it feel good, Alana is thinking dangerously, she would give up all her revenge just for the _just there_  press of Margot's hand, her soft palm that has never worked a day in its life outside clawing for survival. 

Frantic in the dark, they crush together and the weight is so perfect that Alana feels both held and unmoored, drifting towards the island and crashing backwards against Margot’s hipbones in the same breath.

They are still kissing, a sloppy thing with the angle, but sweet too. Did they do this earlier? This simple contract? Alana remembers her mouth on a wrist, fingers, the hollow of a hip. But she’s spent so long denying herself mostly everything, it’s time to take back. And give.

Margot crooks her fingers, beckoning, a sweet invitation and Alana is pitched against the railing looking at nothing but black but she sees that face looking out from a lit doorway, _come with me,_  it says and Alana, at the broken gasp of encouragement in her ear, can do nothing but that. 

When she first came around, when she was more metal than person, more dispair and snarling rage than person, the Doctors would run a tiny wheel up her leg.  

'C _an you feel that?_ ' they would ask patiently. 

 _'I can't feel anything'_ she would snarl. 

Alana comes around to the feel of Margot, hot and physical, sharp and safe, trailing her foot up Alana's shin. Her flannel robe is indeed wonderfully soft and as her toe presses into her sore leg Alana can feel _everything_. 

“Is this why you brought me here?” Alana tips her head back to lean on Margot, looking up at her explosion of hair against a starless sky. 

Margot ducks to drops a kiss on her shoulder and looks up through her lashes, her cheeks are delightfully flushed but her nose nudging Alana's neck is cold. 

“Is this why you came?”

She says it against Alana’s skin, the thin bit over her collarbone, it makes her shiver to her bare toes and she finds she can’t stop.

“Yes.”

“Revenge is closer than Florence, trust me,” Margot leans to nip at Alana’s bottom lip all messy, “clever revenge at least, that’s your role in this.”

“I’m not playing a role,” Alana laces their fingers together over the railing.

They both try to catch their breath.

“Neither am I.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Tegan and Sarah's Drove Me Wild, blame this too I guess https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TygCvQ8Lmug


End file.
